The season three finale of “Final Space” just aired. This show seems to be slipping under the radar, but I’ve become quite impressed with it. In short, it’s an animated sci-fi “comedy” show starring one “Gary Goodspeed,” a somewhat standard goofy loser type who gets into legal trouble while trying to impress a woman, takign control of a military spaceship and causing a great deal of damage to a spaceport because he has no idea what he’s doing. The first season started off pretty uneven; the attempts to be funny sometimes worked, sometimes seemed like they were trying too hard. But as the series has progressed, the humor, while still there, has settled down and the focus of the show has shifted to really quite effective Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
As the show proceeds, the “drama” transitions from a somewhat stock Space Opera bad guy in the form of the “Lord Commander,” to trans-dimensional demigods called Titans that can destroy worlds at a whim, and finally to an entity that terrifies the Titans. Characters grow and characters die, and it’s emotionally affecting when they do so. The good guys fail; whole worlds die; reality itself is warped and broken. Good characters turn villainous because they’re tragically flawed, traumatized and influenced by powers beyond their reckoning. There are some neat ideas; the sci-fi is good and the animation is at times spectacular. More than once my eyebrows popped up and I muttered “damn,” watching something vast that I kinda wish I’d thought of. The show does not try to be “Futurama,” fortunately, but is its own thing. Some people have a problem with the fact that this show tries to be funny and silly… but to me the dissonance of silliness mixed with some really horrific things *works.*
The first two seasons are on HBO max, DirecTV, Adukt swim and TBS; the third is on Hulu. The first two seasons are also on Blu-Ray.
Here’s the final scene from the season 3 finale. It is a bit spoilery, of course… but try to imagine *any* other western animated series ending a season with a scene like this:
The use of music, both the score written for the series and songs from elsewhere that they’ve used, is really very well done. It’s too spoilery to give the details but one scene is heartbreaking and powerful in no small part to the use of “Enter One:”